Elevator shafts are a costly but necessary component of any high-rise building. Now, some companies that design and make elevators think they’ve found a way to address that dilemma through the use of artificial intelligence.
At The Hub on Causeway in Boston, Gensler architects included so-called smart elevators in the mixed-use project's design. Older elevator systems would have required 12 elevator shafts to serve the three-tower complex. However, technologies like destination dispatching and machine learning allowed Gensler to cut that number to eight, creating more rentable square feet in the building.
“Elevators and staircases are not leaseable space,” Todd Staples, an architect at Gensler who worked on the project, told CoStar News. Smart elevator systems “reduce the areas where you’re not making money.”
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Two trends in commercial real estate are driving the push to develop systems that use fewer hoistways, an industry term for the vertical columns that house moving elevators. One is the need to convert outdated and largely vacant office buildings to new uses. The other is the desire for greater density in urban areas through high-rise towers with multiple uses such as residential, hotel, office and specialty tenants like fitness clubs or event space.
Artificial intelligence enhances the process. AI-equipped elevator systems learn which floors receive the most visitors during specific times and on certain days, Lucien Wedzikowski, vice president of global major projects at Otis, told CoStar News.
Most of the world’s largest elevator makers have designed proprietary smart-elevator product lines, including Schindler, Otis Worldwide, TK Elevator (formerly ThyssenKrupp) Kone and Mitsubishi Electric.
The Hub on Causeway, developed by BXP and Delaware North, compresses a spectrum of uses into a single property in Boston’s West End district. High-rise, mixed-use towers help everything from carbon emissions to lowering expenses for taxpayer-funded services like trash collection and sewage systems, according to Forth Bagley, principal at Kohn Pedersen Fox, a New York-based architecture firm that has designed six of the world’s 12 tallest buildings.
“High-density, mixed-use mega projects connected to public transportation are some of the most environmentally progressive buildings in the world,” Bagley said on his firm’s website.
Significant costs
To be certain, smart elevator systems are more expensive than standard models. They can also limit the ability of a high-rise tower to be converted to other uses should the building owner choose that path in the future because of the property's foundation.
Typical installation costs for a commercial elevator range between $50,000 and $100,000 per landing, the vestibule where guests wait for an elevator car, not including operation and maintenance costs, according to Day Elevator & Lift, an elevator dealership in Lynbrook, New York.
However, “elevators located in larger buildings, such as those reaching several stories in height, and within businesses that have complex passenger movement needs can cost significantly more,” Day Elevator & Lift said.
Architects who spoke with CoStar News and officials at Schindler and Otis declined to provide cost estimates for smart elevator systems.
However, the urgent need of investors who own outdated office buildings with low occupancy rates could overshadow the higher cost of smart elevators, according to some elevator company executives and architects.
Many office buildings aren’t suitable for conversion because of their structures, architects and property specialists say. The size and shape of office-building floors are typically too large for economical reconfiguration into residences, said Mark Giles, senior architect and principal in the Los Angeles office of DLR Group.
"The deeper floor plates of office buildings require deeper residential units," Giles told CoStar News. "If the residential units are larger than similar units in that market, you may not be able to get more rent to compensate for the costs of conversion."
Smart elevator systems address that problem, Florian Troesch, head of transit management and digital solutions at Schindler, told CoStar News. Because they need fewer shafts, new space is created within the core of the building to house stairwells and mechanical, electrical and plumbing equipment. The extra space that's created gives architects more flexibility in dividing the floor of a former office building into apartments that can generate market-rate rents, he said.
Potential market
The market for office-to-residential conversions is potentially huge, said Rhea Stephen, senior director of market analytics at CoStar. In the U.S., at least 417 office towers not occupied by the building owner have vacancy rates of at least 50%, according to CoStar data.
Executives at Ebikon, Switzerland-based Schindler believe the initial wave of customers for their MetaCore line of smart elevators will be developers pursuing office conversion products.
“The best way to economically serve the commercial real estate business is to repurpose buildings, if it doesn’t make environmental or economic sense to tear a building down,” Pritesh Thaker, destination dispatch product manager at Schindler, told CoStar News.
Schindler’s MetaCore product line technology has been deployed at only one building, the 45-story Omniturm, a mixed-use tower in Frankfurt, Germany, that opened in 2019. Developer Commerz Real pitched it to potential office tenants that wanted to provide executive apartments as the tower includes office and residential space, in addition to a hotel.
Yet, Schindler has received a steady stream of calls from designers and developers interested in discussing the product, primarily those looking to convert outdated office buildings, Troesch said.
Smart elevators also make sense for high-rise, mixed-use towers, said CoStar's Stephen. The potential to include special amenities on higher floors, such as spas, fitness centers and patios, will be attractive to investors who are seeking additional space to lease.
“In today’s office market, where multiple, tricked-out amenity floors are becoming the norm — including spas, fitness centers and upper-floor patio buildouts — office building owners may greatly appreciate the opportunity to get a chunk of additional leasable square footage onto the tenant roster,” Stephen said.
In addition to creating extra space that can be leased, they provide better service to the building’s hotel guests, office workers and full-time residents, an Otis spokesperson said.
Destination dispatching is a computer code that tells visitors which elevator car to ride, rather than the visitor pushing an up or down button.
At a building’s security gate, a visitor is assigned to a specific elevator through their smartphone. The system then selects the “optimal car to respond based on factors such as waiting time, travel time, current car occupancy and energy consumption,” according to elevator manufacturer Mitsubishi Electric.
Algorithms that power these elevator systems know which cars will be overloaded, based on the specific floor the rider wants to visit and the time of day, according to Otis.
The result: Guests reach their destination faster and are restricted from visiting other floors. A hotel guest, for example, can’t get off on an office floor.
“Unlike conventional elevator control systems which only register the desired travel direction, our destination control system reduces waiting and travel times by taking into account the number of passengers and their destination floors,” according to Espoo, Finland-based Kone, developer of the Office Flow product line of smart elevators.
Adapting to usage
The AI function allows the system to learn travel patterns and adjust accordingly.
"The system automatically adapts to building traffic, borrowing from less-active banks to serve peak activity during busy periods, reducing journey and waiting times," he said.
These features can help justify the higher costs of smart systems like Otis’ SuperGroup elevators and AI-based software Compass Infinity, Wedzikowski said.
"The materials and the labor costs, as well as impacts on the building core and vertical space, are worth it," Wedzikowski said.
There are potential drawbacks to smart-elevator systems, though, said Benjamin Simmons, an associate principal at the New Haven, Connecticut-based architecture firm Pickard Chilton.
“These ideas are very intriguing,” Simmons told CoStar News, explaining that Pickard Chilton has studied new elevator technologies but has only made limited use of them in its designs.
The issue is that if a building has a limited number of elevator shafts or even just a single shaft, only certain usage types can occupy the top floors, Simmons said. One reason is floor heights: office floors typically have higher ceilings than residential floors. In mixed-use towers, multiple elevator shafts are needed because some have doors that can open on floors with 13-foot ceilings, for example.
If a building owner wants to later rearrange the stacking of property uses by floors, expensive construction would be needed.
This concern wouldn't apply to a building owner who has no intention of converting a mixed-use, high-rise building, Simmons said. But future owners could potentially seek to redevelop and repurpose the building.
“At what point do you say that you’re willing to throw more money at a property to make it bulletproof for the long-term,” Simmons added.
Other architects think that the wide range of benefits that come with smart elevator systems offset worries about potential future uses.
“There is a huge financial gain in recouping leaseable square footage that’s otherwise lost,” Gensler's Staples said. “It’s not just the gain of square footage, but the gain of square footage in the right place.”